In Zimbabwe Talks, Who Will Get the Real Power?

Sunday

Jul 27, 2008 at 3:35 AM

Negotiators are confronting a seemingly unbridgeable divide over executive power in a unity government.

CELIA W. DUGGER

JOHANNESBURG — As negotiators for President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai began power-sharing talks on Thursday in South Africa, they confronted one seemingly unbridgeable divide: which man would have the real executive power in a unity government?

Mr. Mugabe’s governing party, ZANU-PF, insisted that Mr. Mugabe, as the victor in a runoff that has been denounced internationally as a sham, would name any new government, The Herald, a state-owned newspaper, reported Friday.

But the opposition says Mr. Tsvangirai, who outpolled Mr. Mugabe in March elections and dropped out of the runoff, citing murderous violence against supporters, must be in charge. “Whatever transition we come up with, it must be led by Morgan Tsvangirai,” Thokozani Khupe, vice president of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said in an interview on Saturday.

A collapse of the talks could lead to an accelerating implosion of Zimbabwe’s economy and the flight of millions more people from Mr. Mugabe’s increasingly repressive rule into neighboring countries, potentially destabilizing the region. The Mugabe government’s economic isolation intensified last week as the United States and the European Union tightened sanctions.

But a settlement that left Mr. Mugabe or his allies in power would be a blow to democratic aspirations on the continent after an election that independent observers from across Africa unanimously concluded was neither free nor fair.

One of the most remarkable changes to emerge from Zimbabwe’s violent election season is that leaders in Zambia and Botswana have resoundingly broken the silence of Mr. Mugabe’s peers in the region about the human rights abuses committed by his governing party.

Phandu Skelemani, the foreign minister of neighboring Botswana, which has refused to recognize Mr. Mugabe’s legitimacy, said in an interview on Wednesday that his country would not be party to what he called “the raping of democracy” in Zimbabwe.

With rumors swirling that Mr. Mugabe, 84, and Mr. Tsvangirai, 56, are close to a deal in talks that are supposed to last only two weeks, Ms. Khupe, a member of Parliament from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, said she had not been informed yet about the progress of the negotiations. But she noted that any agreement from the talks, which are being held at a secret location in Pretoria, would have to be approved by the party’s leadership.

Some African and Western officials worry the opposition may yet get outfoxed by Mr. Mugabe, who has kept a tight grip on power for 28 years.

Shadowing the current talks is the memory of an earlier set of unity negotiations. In 1987, after years in which historians estimated that Mr. Mugabe’s military forces killed at least 10,000 civilians in the stronghold of his rival Joshua Nkomo, Mr. Nkomo joined the government, allowing Mr. Mugabe to further solidify his hold on power.

The current talks, too, were preceded by a violent onslaught. Since April, according to doctors who treated the wounded and tallied the dead, thousands of Mr. Tsvangirai’s supporters have been assaulted by Mr. Mugabe’s enforcers and more than 100 have been killed, decimating the opposition’s grass-roots leadership.

“Tsvangirai may be lured into accepting a power-sharing arrangement which would lead to Mugabe succeeding himself through puppets from ZANU-PF,” Raila Odinga, the Kenyan prime minister, said in an interview on Thursday. “The best option for Tsvangirai is to insist that Mugabe becomes a ceremonial president with executive powers vested in the prime minister” — a position that would be held by Mr. Tsvangirai.

Mr. Odinga speaks from his own experience with unity talks. Once the Kenyan opposition leader, he became prime minister in February after a deal brokered by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general. It followed a deeply flawed election that some observers believe had been stolen from Mr. Odinga.

Mr. Odinga, who has met with Zimbabwean opposition leaders including Mr. Tsvangirai in recent months, said he had sent a senior official from his own party to Johannesburg to advise the opposition during the talks.

Mr. Skelemani, the Botswana foreign minister, said the fundamental issue for Zimbabwe was who controlled the executive powers held by the president under the country’s Constitution. Referring to the possibility that Mr. Mugabe’s negotiators would try “to do a Nkomo” on Mr. Tsvangirai, Mr. Skelemani warned that the opposition would “risk emasculation” if it allowed Mr. Mugabe to retain the presidency. Asked about Mr. Mugabe’s stated desire to hold on to power, Mr. Skelemani replied, “What power? Power to run the country into the ground?”

Botswana’s increasingly urgent criticism of Mr. Mugabe, along with similar concerns voiced by Zambia’s president, Levy Mwanawasa, highlight what Martin Meredith, author of “The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence,” (PublicAffairs, 2005) called an unprecedented development in the 14-nation bloc of the Southern African Development Community. “This group of S.A.D.C. countries has always tried to hold on to the image of unity,” he said. “This is shattering it.”

Since Mr. Mwanawasa suffered a stroke last month, Botswana has become the leading critic in detailed public statements about the recent election violence and rigging. “The atrocities have been corroborated and constitute the necessary evidence to conclude that the credibility and integrity of the election process was compromised,” according to the report of Botswana’s election observer team.

Botswana’s statements carry moral authority: Its democratic traditions stretch back decades, as does its reputation for spending its wealth from diamonds to improve the public welfare rather than enrich the governing elite.

Botswana’s and Zambia’s public statements pose a serious challenge to the “quiet diplomacy” pursued by the region’s most powerful player, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who is mediating the current talks. He has resisted domestic pressure here in South Africa to criticize Mr. Mugabe, repeatedly greeting him in recent months with a handshake and a smile.

Mr. Mbeki held on to control of the Zimbabwe mediation with the endorsement of the African Union on July 1. But in a meeting of African heads of state in Egypt, Mr. Mugabe listened with consternation as officials representing Liberia, Nigeria and Botswana, among others, delivered humiliating critiques of the political violence that marred the election, according to several officials who were present. He counterattacked, accusing his critics of failings of their own.

“You’re talking about somebody who’s been in power 30 years,” Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, said in a recent interview. “Support wears thin.” Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated economist who became Africa’s first female elected head of state in 2005, added, “There’s a lot going on in S.A.D.C. and the A.U. behind the scenes, much more than was reflected in the open statements.”

Botswana’s vice president, Mompati S. Merafhe, sitting just two seats from Mr. Mugabe, said the Zimbabwean leader should be suspended from the African Union, Mr. Skelemani said.

Botswana seems to have been greatly affected by its ringside view of the Zimbabwe crisis. When Mr. Tsvangirai fled Zimbabwe in the middle of the night on April 8, just 10 days after the general election, citing death threats, he crossed into Botswana and was granted refuge.

That same month, Botswana’s new president, Seretse Khama Ian Khama, asked Mr. Mwanawasa, president of Zambia and the leader of the Southern African Development Community, to convene an emergency summit meeting of regional heads of state on Zimbabwe, Mr. Skelemani said. Subsequently, victims of the political violence began streaming into Botswana.

The accounts its election observers brought back from Zimbabwe deepened Botswana’s official revulsion. Ruth Seretse, the deputy director of Botswana’s directorate on corruption and economic crime, led the 50-person observer team. She said in an interview that she had seen ZANU-PF youth militia members beating people at a rally for Mr. Tsvangirai in Harare.

“People ran for their lives,” she said. “The riot police just stood there.”

For two weeks, she monitored faxes and text messages from Botswanan observers deployed across the country. Some of the most disturbing reports came from Bakwena Oitsile, a retired major general in Botswana’s army. He said in an interview that in one village in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland West Province, he had found 14 houses, as well as grain stores, burned and reduced to ashes. Pregnant women and children there had nothing left but the clothes on their backs.

In another village in the province, he arrived just hours after an attack on June 17. In one hut, he discovered the body of a man just beaten to death and his wife, still alive, with a deep cut on her head. Another woman’s index finger had been cut off. Her hand was still raw and untreated.

“She was in great pain when we were there,” he said. “She was screaming.”

He said of what he witnessed in Zimbabwe: “I will never forget it. It’s all in my heart and head.”

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